Uwe and Brian, Thanks for your attention to this one.
We currently have the following array of atypical situations in our corporate installation: (1) Central install directory, where I neither have nor can reasonably want Administrator priviledges; (2) IT staff willing to maintain R officially but wants to leave *contributed* packages to user groups if at all possible; (3) Direct access from R to the CRAN not working through any of the methods owing to the proxy server. So I downloaded some 40 contributed package *.ZIP files directly from CRAN using Internet Explorer, then ran install.packages() in R on these local zipfiles with parameter CRAN=NULL. Except for the case-sensitivity of the "*.zip" extension in install.packages(), which I amended myself, this appears to have worked fine, passed checksums, etc. Since I installed the packages with install.packages() and they passed checksum, I don't see why they would not work. Some simple tests worked, and setting libPaths() and running installed.packages() suggests that R knows what it has. I can continue on fine as is, so the remaining question is whether install.packages() should be amended for other users. I felt it did not fulfill its contract in a basic way. However, I did enjoy learning about R debug facilities, something I'll need to know .... Regards, Jeremy Primer -----Original Message----- From: Prof Brian Ripley [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, November 02, 2004 3:45 AM To: Uwe Ligges Cc: Primer, Jeremy (FID); R-devel Subject: Re: [Rd] Re: [R] case-insensitive ZIP On Tue, 2 Nov 2004, Uwe Ligges wrote: > Primer, Jeremy (FID) wrote: > > > A development note: > > > > In the function "install.packages", it would be helpful to those of > > us who have atypical installations and install manually from ZIP > > files to Perhaps you could tell us why you do this? Where do you get `contributed zipfiles' that are actually `ZIPfiles', especially as CRAN has .zip files you could get instead? Or is the problem in the way you get them? > > have > > > > pkgnames <- sub("\\.zip$", "", pkgnames) > > > > replaced with > > > > pkgnames <- sub("\\.zip$", "", pkgnames, ignore.case = TRUE) > > > > because the contributed zipfiles are ZIPfiles. The routine did not > > work for me out of the box. > > [moved to R-devel] > > Hmmm. Recent versions of R require correctly installed versions (using > R CMD INSTALL) of the packages. It is hard work to get a file called > *.ZIP (rather than *.zip) that contains a valid binary package for Windows. > I'd vote against such a change, since the recent behaviour suggests > perfectly well that the file probably won't work. Nothing stops people with `atypical installations' amending functions to suit their atypicality, but it is usually better to fix your local problems that expect your tools to workaround them. [Analogously, R CMD INSTALL will not install .tgz files on Unix, even though some people distribute them: they are (equally) not a supported format.] -- Brian D. Ripley, [EMAIL PROTECTED] Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/ University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self) 1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA) Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595 -------------------------------------------------------- This is not an offer (or solicitation of an offer) to buy/se...{{dropped}} ______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
